The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heav’n
Than when I was a boy.”
There it is, the mystic, divine influence of nature through the atmosphere of the country of one’s birth; every immigrant to this country makes that great surrender.
There is, too, the early humanity. You go down town, you who are native-born American citizens, and every day you meet those whom you have known from birth, your earliest playmates and schoolmates, and those who went to college with you, who entered business with you, who fought side by side with you through the Great War, who loved what you loved in early life, revered what you revered, laughed at what you laughed at and felt as you felt over the glory and the tenderness of existence. You do not know what they have left behind them who never see a face that they knew in childhood, who will never meet again, till time is no more, a schoolmate or an early companion, who will never gather again in the old home with father and mother and brothers and sisters; only the most favored have had a fugitive glance, like looking at a telegraph pole from an express train, of those dear, early faces. There is a whole world of bereavement of early, tender, beautiful humanity on the part of all who come here. And this again you hear in those two verses in “Auld Lang Syne”:—
“We twa hae run about the braes,